by Fujino Omori
A violent, inorganic, high-pitched keening.
It’s like a knife being drawn across a taut silver bowstring, piercing my eardrums.
Or a soprano the size of the whole world crying out.
This violent, unmistakable wail of the Dungeon sets my instincts flashing red.
“Aaah…Aaaaah…!”
I can’t block my ears, since I’m still restraining Lyu, but my whole body is tense. Just then, the strength drains from her body.
“It’s just like that time…all over again…Aaah, Alize…!”
“Miss Lyu? Miss Lyu?”
Her slim body collapses, and I scramble to support her. I’m calling her name in a panic as her face turns white and then blue.
I don’t know this Lyu.
Who is this person with the vacant eyes hollowed out by trauma?
“Run…Escape!!”
“What…?”
She looks up at me as she utters her command in a broken voice.
Our faces are so close they’re nearly touching. She’s gripping my clothes.
“Get out of here as fast as you can!! Even if you have to go alone—hurry!!”
That’s when I understand.
Now it makes sense why she tried so hard to get rid of me when I first encountered her on this floor.
She was afraid something like this was going to happen.
The catman stands up.
“It’s too late!” he howls.
He looks up at the ceiling as if he’s pointing with his missing arm.
“You and I, we’re both trapped in despair!”
His smile twitches. He, too, is pale.
“Come and get us! Show yourself!” he shouts, like he’s throwing down his chips on the gamble of his life. His voice is full of joy.
“Appear before us once again!!”
“—”
The prophetess of tragedy lowered one knee to the ground.
“Cassandra?”
“Lady Cassandra?”
She could not hear Daphne’s voice. She could not see Haruhime or the others who ran to her side. Flashes of light were running through her head. She knew “that time” had come.
“Aa…Aaa…”
The wails of the Dungeon were the “lament.”
Her face was as pale as Lyu’s. She grabbed her head with both hands, frozen in place as the prophecy fell from her lips.
“‘A great calamity…draws near.’”
Crack!
A fissure spread through the cavern on the twenty-seventh floor.
It was a long, wide, deep fissure, running vertically opposite the Great Falls.
The first thing to spring from the fissure was liquid.
The purple serum spewed out like blood, steam rising from it. The emerald-blue water clouded as if it had been soiled with sewer sludge.
The crack widened, scattering fragments of crystal, as if the Dungeon were splitting open its own womb.
Finally.
A scarlet eye glinted from the depths of the fissure.
Despair let out its newborn cry.
CHAPTER 5
CALAMITY ARRIVES
“Bors, this is bad!”
“I’ve never heard the Dungeon make this noise before! Let’s get outta here!”
The adventurers had gathered together again after being scattered by their encounter with Gale Wind, and they were now chasing her and Bell in a group.
They were determined to kill the legendary fugitive with their own hands. She had managed to get away after the surprise attack, but they were sure that with a group this big, they would be able to take her down.
Things were changing quickly, however.
There had been the tremendous explosions on the twenty-fifth floor, and now the wails that were unquestionably coming from the Dungeon. Everyone guessed that the high-frequency sounds, so loud they could not stand to leave their ears uncovered, signaled an irregularity.
The upper-class adventurers knew something unprecedented was about to happen, and without exception they petitioned the head of Rivira to evacuate the party from the floor.
“Hey, Bors! Bors!”
“…Wait.”
“Huh?”
They stopped moving as Bors thrust his palm toward them.
He removed his other hand from the side of his giant eye-patch-adorned head and muttered.
“The sound…has stopped.”
The mermaid wrapped her arms around her body.
Ugh…I hate this sound…!
She was deep underwater, surrounded by bluish darkness.
She had dived down to escape the horrible cry of her mother, the Dungeon, trying to hide in the water. Her body curled like a fetus, she desperately pressed her hands against the fins that served as her ears.
I’m scared, scared, scared…!
It had happened before, just once.
It had been five years ago, she was sure.
She had heard her mother’s lament coming from far deeper in the Dungeon. Of course, that time it had nothing to do with Mari, who could not leave the Water Capital, but still, she had been frightened.
Something bad had been born that time, too. She didn’t know much, but she knew that. She understood.
Mari pressed her hands to her ears and squeezed her eyes shut.
She had escaped to the depths of the water in an attempt to separate herself from the terrifying reality. But behind her shut eyelids, she saw her friends and her family—the Xenos.
The Xenos, and an image of the back of the boy she had met so recently in the Dungeon.
That boy, who was as important to her as her own family, was here.
He was already among her most prized treasures.
Bell…!
She pushed away her fear and forced her eyes open.
Her tears spilling into the water and her tail beating against it, the mermaid swam toward the surface where the light filtered in.
“That was close…” Lilly muttered, ignoring the bead of sweat that was dripping down her chin.
Before her eyes was a collapsed crystal floor. Far below, she could see the raging waterway.
Her party had barely managed to escape disaster thus far as they ran through the crumbling twenty-fifth floor, explosions ringing out all around them and destroying anything resembling a road.
They didn’t know how extensive the damage was, but they knew it was bad. In any case, it was no time to be fighting monsters, who were in the same situation as they were.
The water paradise had become a ruined capital, and some routes were now impassable. Lilly feared that until the Dungeon finished repairing itself, they would not be able to make it back to the passageway that led to the twenty-fourth floor.
“I’m worried about these explosions, but…!”
“That insanely high-pitched noise just a minute ago…Was that from the twenty-seventh floor?!”
“If that was an irregularity, then Sir Bell…?!”
Aisha, Welf, and Mikoto were equally distraught.
“Cassandra! Cassandra! Pull yourself together!”
“Lady Cassandra?”
But the healer was more upset than any of them.
She was collapsed on the floor, unresponsive to Daphne, who was kneeling by her side and shaking her shoulder, or Haruhime, who was frantically calling her name.
The strength had drained from her legs, and she gripped her head in both hands. Her face was white. Her blood had drained away to the point that her companions wondered whether it was possible for a person to sink that deeply into despair.
It was strange.
Lilly couldn’t understand what had happened.
Ouka and Welf felt the same as they looked on, holding their breath nervously.
Their ability to think was dulled in the midst of the chaos.
Lilly could barely make out what Cassandra was saying.
“…n…un…”
She was shrieking something over and over.
; “Run…!”
As the sound of shattering crystal rocks rang out, it silently appeared from within the fissure.
Spawned from the wall of the cavern, it fell into the plunge pool with a tremendous splash.
Its newborn cry was an unpleasantly warm sigh.
As the crashing sound of the Great Falls beat against its skin, the white mist veiled its silhouette.
It neither howled nor roared a battle cry but instead swished its long tail and moved its two legs, sending ripples across the water’s surface.
Deep in its eye socket, a sinister crimson light glinted.
At the edge of the plunge pool as broad as a lake, it bent its joints, and its knees creaked.
The next instant, it disappeared.
It had burst from the water’s surface and into the floor’s internal maze.
“Hey, shouldn’t we try to meet up with Bors?”
“Idiot. We save our own skins first!”
The small band of adventurers was on the twenty-seventh floor, but they had been unable to meet up with Bors’s main party. Instead, the four-man party comprised of humans and animal people had hurriedly turned back up the road they came down. They had lost their nerve in the face of the Dungeon’s irregularity.
For a bunch of hooligans who made their living by exploring the Dungeon, it was the obvious course of action.
But things didn’t go as they expected.
“…? What’s that noise…?”
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!
A strange sound was coming from behind them.
It sounded like something was jumping up and down. The adventurers stopped and looked over their shoulders.
The noise was quickly approaching them.
A shadow flickered in the depths of the passage.
“Huh?”
“Something’s com—”
Pop!
There was a rather pleasant sound, and then the adventurer’s head burst open, so that he could not finish his sentence.
Even when his final moment came, he did not know what had happened.
He had become a silent lump of flesh, with fountains of blood spurting from him as his knees sank to the ground.
It happened four times.
They were annihilated.
It ignored the fresh blood dripping from its claws and trampled on the adventurers’ corpses.
As its massive shadow fell over the maze, the monster reversed course.
It was headed toward its next prey.
“A…Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”
A scream echoed through the Dungeon.
It was the wail of a weeping lancer.
His small party had been demolished by a sudden attack.
The elven sorcerer had been killed first. She had been determined to purge her shameful fellow elf Gale Wind from their race, and her pridefulness verged on bragging, making her an unpleasant woman to be around. Still, although she was not docile, she was thoughtful in her strange way, and he had thought her something of a good woman. She was the first to fall victim to the claws. Her body was ripped in half at the waist. Her guts spilled out and blood dripped from her vacant eyes. She had died in a way no proud elf would willingly allow. And so the man had lost control of himself and thrust his sword forward. But it met only air. Everything before him went black, and his head split open.
When he fell, his hand brushed the cheek of the elf who cried tears of blood.
“What is this thing? I don’t know…What are youuuuuuuu?!”
The fifth adventurer, a half elf and the last one left standing, pulled out his magic blade.
There was an explosion followed by flames.
When the smoke cleared, it had disappeared, leaving the burned corpse of the fifth adventurer sprawled in the passage.
The shadow ran and danced, and then the next one did, and the next.
The Dungeon filled with screams.
Screams of agony were joined by fountains of blood.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!”
Faster and faster, so fast it was unbelievable, the corpses multiplied.
It had a merciless sense of where the adventurers were, and it snuffed out their lives one by one.
Its slashing claws tore apart whatever they came in contact with. Its biting fangs chewed through flesh and armor alike. Its thrashing tail knocked blood from the mouths of adventurers.
There was nothing the fifty-some adventurers on the twenty-seventh floor could do. They were simply slaughtered.
“Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!”
All who saw it cried out.
“What is that huge thi—?!”
All who saw it trembled with fear.
“The t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t t-t-t-t-teeth are…”
All who saw it were destroyed and devoured.
Their screams echoed.
Their weapons shattered.
They tried to run, but they could not.
“Bors, save us!! Sav—Aaah!!”
“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!”
The banquet was unending.
There were many “wails” as the “road of viscera” was built within the crystal maze.
The “azure current” now “ran red with blood.”
As the corpses of the adventurers multiplied one by one, the monsters—the “grotesque horde”—rejoiced.
They drank the blood of the humans that stained the waterways as if it were fresh dew, and they greedily devoured the bodies the water carried to them as if they were the finest meat.
Some adventurers bloomed into “flowers of flesh.”
Some were “swiftly torn asunder.”
Some were “shattered.”
The dignity of some became as “playthings.”
Those who tried in desperation to escape were knocked down by other monsters, who swarmed around them and tore them apart with “countless fangs and claws,” and they were “mourned” all the more miserably.
Those who died and left their comrades behind “imparted sorrow.” But those who mourned them soon followed the same path.
The Water Capital had transformed into the stage for a massacre.
“Oh my…!”
“This is…”
When they saw it, Chigusa trembled in fear and Ouka was stunned.
They were in the cavern on the twenty-fifth floor.
Lilly and the rest of the party stood on the cliff at the mouth of the waterfall, near the passage leading to the twenty-sixth floor, and looked down on the scene as the falling water thundered in their ears. They had just emerged into the cavern.
The Great Falls ran red. A faint, fleeting red.
The cascade, which was directly connected to the waterways within the maze, was spitting out a river of blood produced by the monsters’ feast. The emerald-blue of the plunge pool on the twenty-seventh floor was but a fai
nt memory.
Bobbing in the water far below, so distant they looked to Lilly and the others like black specks, were the dismembered legs and arms of the half-devoured corpses. The pitiful fragments of weapons and adventurers floated and sank at the lowest level of the water paradise.
The “depths of hell” overflowed with corpses, returning all to the “mother,” the Dungeon.
“No way…Is that all…blood…?”
Welf could not conceal the shaking in his voice.
“It’s insane; how many adventurers…? Not everyone who went to the twenty-seventh floor…?”
Mikoto’s voice, too, faded away as she contemplated the possibility.
“Please stop joking around!! Mr. Bell is still alive! Mr. Bell is…!” Lilly said in a panic.
Haruhime, even more panicked than Lilly, had gone completely white.
“Ah, aaah…!!”
Even Aisha was in a daze.
“…What the hell is happening?”
The second-tier adventurer shifted her gaze from the bloodred plunge pool to the fissure opposite it.
For a moment, she forgot to breathe as she imagined what had been spawned from that all-too-deep crevice.
“…Let’s go to the twenty-seventh floor! I don’t know what’s happening, but we have to save Mr. Bell!” Lilly shouted. Far above her, standing on the cliff by the passage leading to the twenty-fourth floor, another group of adventurers was screaming.
The tunnel leading to the inside of the twenty-sixth floor was on the southeastern side of the cavern where Lilly and the others stood now. For Hestia Familia, the floors below were an unknown world, but all nodded back at Lilly. Neither Welf nor Mikoto nor Haruhime hesitated for even an instant.
Lilly was about to take off running through the cavern with the others in tow when Cassandra, who had been silent up to that point, grabbed her hand.
“!! Miss Cassandra! This isn’t the time to play arou—”
She broke off mid-word when she looked up at the face of the girl grasping her small hand in both of her own.
“Cassan…dra…?” Daphne said, standing as still as Lilly.
Welf and the others had stopped as well and were staring silently at Cassandra.
“I’m sorry…I’m sorry; I’m sorry; I’m sorry…!”
She was sobbing, but she would not let go of Lilly’s hand.